Every year, in northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, the city of Harbin hosts the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, featuring massive ice and snow sculptures. At night, the sculptures are colorfully illuminated and visitors can climb and play on some of the structures. The festival officially opened on January 5 this year, and will run through the end of February. According to organizers, the winter festival now draws several million tourists each year, from China and from abroad.

This week we have photographs from Nepal, China, Venezuela, Siberia, Israel, Ukraine, Missouri, Nevada, outer space, and many more locations. Also, this week, I’m playing with visual rhyming—couplets and triplets of images that relate to each other or play off each other, either visually or contextually (or both). Several pairs and trios of images within today’s essay are deliberately sequenced in this manner, some more subtle than others. Please let me know, in comments or directly, if you like this, or if it feels a bit gimmicky, thanks.

I had known about the Finnish sport of wife-carrying (my parents once did it on a trip to Finland), but I hadn’t appreciated, till reading this Fox News item, that there is a North American version: the North American Wife Carrying Championship, in Newry, Maine, held each Columbus Day weekend, apparently going for over a decade now.

Contestants consist of pairs of husband-wife teams (though apparently, they allow unmarried couples as well, oh well), running through and around a variety of obstacles – e.g. up sand dunes, through waterholes. If you drop your partner at any point, a time penalty is added to your total time.

As with the Finnish ones, if you win, you win your wife’s weight in beer, as well as cash, which is awesome, though it does present a quandary of sorts: on the one hand, the bigger your wife is, the more beer you’d…